Spiraling down
by nowayoutofthis
Summary: You can't tell if you are dreaming or just living – it's too bright and blurry, always too bright and blurry, and than she comes into focus with all that gold and yellow, all that gold and yellow and bits of an unusual purple. / Adrian is going insane. Sydney pushes him back to reality.


**AN:** I wrote this at late at night, after a reread of The Indigo Spell. It was kind of exploring the deepness of spirit going crazy versus Sydney being able to pull out the bad things of it from Adrian. I don't know how much of this I like and how much I hate, but it took me time so here it is =)

* * *

**"No night is too late and nothing is too much and nothing is enough"**

**MARYA HORNBACHER**

* * *

You are no good.

You are no good and yet – yet she brings the good out of you, extracting every single drop of happiness and good sense that remains shadowed in your head. You are slowly going insane, seeing things were they should not be and inventing imaginary words, but imaginary words that merge into reality. You can't tell if you are dreaming or just living – it's too bright and blurry, always too bright and blurry, and than she comes into focus with all that gold and yellow, all that gold and yellow and bits of an unusual purple. But it's just a frame, just one frame of her, and she long disappears because something is making her run away from you.

* * *

The alcohol tames your mind. It goes down your throat, burning and burning and burning, but you can't even feel that anymore. You are numb. Your thoughts drift away from you and you blame the wine, the vodka, the cheap beer. But deep down – oh, deep down in you, where there is still some belated conscience – you know it's not what you drink. It's what you don't. It's who you don't.

After her sister, Zoe, comes, you are locked. Not emotionally locked – although that is also happening – but literally behind bars locked – and you notice they come. They come every night, they study you, they study what you paint and what you read and the little you speak, and all you can murmur is some nonsense about gold and eyes and lilies. They have lilies too, but they are not the lily that you are talking about; the flower you remember is soft and strong and gold, as bright as yellow gold, glowing out of a girl's pale skin that you used to kiss in your dreams.

Somewhere along that you loose track of time, and your senses become worse. You don't know if it was really Belikov vising you or some strange nightmare, but when Rose comes, you suspect it was real; he was really there, along with someone analyzing your aura and muttering words for another person you could not recognize. Your ex girlfriend looks at you in a strange way all the time, whispering over and over how sorry is she, and how Lissa wants to visit you but can't – can't because they won't ever let her, not the Queen, not another Spirit's user who may enter in this maniac state of mind.

You drift away until she comes.

* * *

She comes in a bad day. You know it's a bad day when you paint a lot and your mind works logically. When you can think clearly. When you realize how trapped you are.

But she comes – she walks throw the white, plain door, her eyes big and gold and _aware_ – but she is not smiling. There are conflicted emotions in her eyes, and you feel alive and you are burning and you are concient_._

You are feeling again.

* * *

The meeting is quick; she is more an analyzer than anything else, but there is something behind her business-like facade that you recognize as your Sydney, so you trust her. You trust her with all of your disheveled heart, and it pays off. Five days later – or five weeks, or five months, you have no idea – she comes back to rescue you.

- Listen to me – She says, whispering behind your ear, pretending to look at one of your paintings. You realize someone must be watching, hearing, observing everything that it's been happening on all of that visits. You shiver. – They think I am here analyzing you. I need you to pretend you are not happy about it – for you and I to appear as merely strangers. Because I'm gonna break you out, Adrian.

She draws back, and stares at you coldly – but there is something behind her eyes, and you know she is telling the truth, and you know this facade is not her. Is a skin she wears for the Alchemists.

So you nod. She goes, and a few hours later, you are out too.

* * *

It's though.

It's though because you are confused half of the time, and the other half your conscience burns; but you are getting stronger - you need to be stronger - to be able to hold yourself together with the girl who saved you.

And you mean it - she saved you in every way. She saved you from them, but she also saved you from yourself.

* * *

It's been four days she's been out handling papers and false documents.

- Adrian? - She enters the house you've been hiding for the past year, the most time you two have ever spent on a place. You suppose you still have some weeks, months maybe, and it's mainly because they are getting tired of looking for you two. It's been a long time, and the amount false clues she drops in cities you've never been is incredible.

Again, she says your name, but this time is barely a whisper, something made out of surprise in her eyes.

- What did you do? - She asks, now staring at you, staring right into your eyes. There is gold there, mixed with brown and even a little bit of bronze, but all you can see is her, burning, lighting out the place. A flame in the dark.

- Figured this place needed a makeover, you know. - You don't know what startles her more - the old walls, now yellow, or the old kitchen drawers, now fixed, or maybe a little bit of the purple in the plates at the table. Her colors. Your colors.

Sydney starts to finally realize what's happening, and she takes a deep breath. Her shoulders shake.

- I thought your hands didn't do manual labour. - Her smile is half-sided. Her cheeks start to get wet.

- I know, I know; and this won't happen again. - Your words echo in the old living room, in an ancient house, at an unknown place. - Because Adrian Ivashkov is back. - You say that with a smirk in your lips, a smirk that was always followed with some half-drunk sentence, but you are all sane.

And she runs, runs runs, straight into your arms, and you two are finally _together_ again.


End file.
